It is difficult sometimes to imagine what it must be like for a goalkeeper when the quicksands of self-doubt start to take hold. We can probably guess. But it is not easy to get into the goalkeeper's mind when football has started to feel an ordeal and they have to maintain appearance and stop themselves from fully unravelling.

In comedy, the equivalent is commonly known as "dying on your arse". Frank Skinner remembers one place in south London in the 1980s where comics would be hummed off if their jokes weren't funny. The audience would simply hum so loudly the poor devil on stage had little option but to give up and walk off. But it's still nothing compared to the callous humour of the football crowd. "Dodgy keeper" in thousands of gloating voices. Ironic cheers after a simple catch. Sometimes it might be from the supporters of your own team. Those are the moments the football pitch must feel a very lonely, unforgiving place.

Joe Hart once gave the impression he was immune to such vulnerabilities. He is also still young enough in goalkeeper years, at 26, to encourage the sense that one day we might be able to view him that way again. Just not for a while. Hart's form has been troubling for some time – not as consistently bad as sometimes portrayed but erratic, to say the least – and there does come a point when a blip can no longer just be considered a blip. The lapses have intermittently undermined Hart's better performances for more than a year now. That's not a blip, it's a slump.

A slump, in this case, that exposes the lack of options for Roy Hodgson when there are only two other English goalkeepers in the Premier League who get a regular game. One is Ben Foster at West Brom and the other is Norwich City's John Ruddy. Fraser Forster has replaced the injured Foster for the Moldova and Ukraine games even though, behind the scenes, Hodgson has admitted he is not convinced about the Celtic man. Jack Butland has begun the season as third-choice goalkeeper at Stoke City and is back in England's Under‑21s, joined by George Long, who plays for Sheffield United in League One, and Jonathan Bond, a Watford reserve. The choice, in other words, is limited. "Napoleon was wrong when he said we were a nation of shopkeepers," Tom Stoppard wrote in Professional Foul in 1977. "Today England look like a nation of goalkeepers." Not any more.

Eric Steele knows a thing or two about this. Steele was goalkeeping coach at City when they signed Hart in 2006. He also happens to have been part of Sir Alex Ferguson's back-room staff at Manchester United when Foster was at the club. Steele left Old Trafford this summer, when David Moyes took over, and has just given an interview to United We Stand fanzine that helps to explain why Hart has kept his place almost by default.

Foster, Steele says, had most of the attributes to be a great goalkeeper. What he didn't have, according to his former coach, was the strength of personality to play at United. "He's a trained chef. He liked to cook a Sunday lunch. Coming in for a recovery session was a pain in the butt to Ben. He wanted to be at home with a roast."

Foster made all sorts of mistakes because, Steele concludes, he "found the pressure and demands of being a Manchester United player difficult". And United, as Gary Neville always says, is still a good notch or two down on the stresses of playing for England.

Maybe there will come a time when Butland has authentic credentials to challenge Hart. Yet there is also an argument that too much has been made of Butland too quickly. Michael Calvin's book on football's talent‑spotters, The Nowhere Men, tells one story of accompanying Mel Johnson, Liverpool's chief scout in the south, to watch Butland play for Cheltenham Town at Southend United while he was on loan from Birmingham City. Butland was badly at fault for three goals. "Oh Jack," Johnson exclaims at one point. "What a nightmare." Calvin entitles the chapter: "Big Boys Lost". Within five months, Hodgson had made Butland England's youngest ever goalkeeper, aged 19, with a CV amounting to 24 appearances in League Two. That alone epitomises the lack of choice available for Hodgson, never mind the way the England manager spent the best part of a year trying to persuade Foster to come out of international retirement.

So what has gone wrong? Manuel Pellegrini, Hart's manager at Manchester City, will certainly not be alone in suspecting that Hart reached "the top maybe too young". Another theory is that there has not been enough competition for him, with City or England, to keep him on his toes. But there are lots of theories about Hart: that he is too cocky, that he has lost focus (a favourite of Roberto Mancini), that he is too fond of the good life. Steele, incidentally, does mention that Hart "likes the odd night out, but why not?"

Maybe it is a bit of everything. Hart has always had two flaws: his distribution, not quick or accurate enough when there are chances to turn defence into attack, and a habit of parrying shots into the path of opposition players rather than turning them to the side and out of danger.

Increasingly, though, Hart has also seemed susceptible to poor judgment about when to come for the ball and when to stay on his line. One subject of discussion when Hodgson announced his squad was that foreign goalkeeping coaches maybe don't do enough on this part of the English game. Hodgson wouldn't commit to saying as much. Steele, though, sees basic technical weaknesses. "He needs to get the consistency right and improve his distribution by using his left foot." Hart, according to his former mentor, can play for England until he is 40 but has "suffered because of two Italian coaches for club and country".

They were certainly fraught times at City last season. Mancini, it transpires, would have seriously contemplated signing another goalkeeper had he not been sacked. The issue between manager and goalkeeper became a significant point of discussion at City, and it is probably no surprise Hart's form fell away in tandem with the breakdown of their relationship.

Hodgson, like Pellegrini, is more of an arm-around-the-shoulder operator, sticking to the hope that whatever has malfunctioned can be put right. It represents a calculated gamble, but likely the right one. Hodgson is probably a lot more concerned than he actually wants us to know, but there are times in football, as we have seen with David de Gea at Manchester United, when it is worth persevering.

That does not ignore the paradox that Hart, even now, is still considered a mandatory first-team pick. Yet, for all the elementary mistakes, he is too good to discard. And if you want to dispute that, look at the video Micah Richards posted on Twitter in support of his colleague.

It is of the night in early October when Borussia Dortmund outplayed City on their own pitch but left Manchester with only a 1-1 draw because of the man in the opposition goal. Hart played as if Götze, Lewandowski, Reus and everyone else in Die Schwarzgelben could have chucked a handful of pebbles at his net and he would have caught every last one. Hart's problem is that match was almost a year ago and it is a long way back, in more than one sense.

Wham bam, a Hamann scam

Phil Gartside seemed to find it all rather amusing as he reminisced about the time Didier Hamann joined Bolton in 2006 and they transferred him to Manchester City, for £400,000, on the first day. "The full story never actually came out," the Bolton chairman told TalkSport, with Hamann listening in the studio. "What happened was Didi signed for us on a free transfer from Liverpool, came in, signed the papers, and then, for whatever reason, decided it wasn't for you and that you wanted to reconsider.

"We said to you: 'I'm sorry about that, but you've signed.' But what you never realised was that we never actually countersigned the papers and just put them in the drawer. The next thing we know, you came along and told us you'd got this opportunity to go to Manchester City. So we actually sold you without actually signing you, did you know that? We got £400,000 from Manchester City for a player we never actually signed. And that's the truth."

There is actually a word for this kind of scam. City, I'm reliably informed, are looking very closely at what to do about it.

Rooney the cutest of players

So, just imagine Wayne Rooney had put in a transfer request, as José Mourinho wanted him to. Where would that have left him? Manchester United were not going to back down anyway. Rooney had just got the crowd back on-side and it had been made clear to him that he was staying at Old Trafford. So maybe the question should be: what on earth could he have possibly gained by putting in a transfer request?

The last time Rooney went public, in October 2010, the crowd at Old Trafford held up banners calling him a "whore" and a gang of blokes in balaclavas turned up at his gates. This time, funnily enough, he and his agent, Paul Stretford, have taken a different strategy: do your work behind the scenes, play it cute and say absolutely nothing in public that can be used against them, just in case they didn't get their own way. And bravo, it's worked.

Rooney's non-transfer request has been dressed up in some quarters as a sign of loyalty, that he has chosen United over Chelsea, Moyes over Mourinho. Best of all, there are large swathes of United's fanbase (not all, thankfully) who actually seem to believe he never wanted to leave in the first place.

It's PR (People Reeled-in), the modern way. Football really is the sport where the people watching it tend to believe only what they want to believe.

Hollow tribute to a no-goal show

That was some statement from Roy Hodgson about it being wrong to think Manchester United's goalless draw against Chelsea had been disappointing in any way. On the contrary, he said, it had been "outstanding". He went as far as to say it was the best game he had seen this season.

In a different era, a comment like that would have seen "Plonker" headlines on the back of the red tops. It's a different media these days but this kind of statement does help to explain why England have beaten only Moldova and San Marino and not managed more than a single goal in games against Montenegro, Poland and Ukraine.